EQMM, February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Dell Magazines

  www.dellmagazines.com

  Copyright ©2008 by Dell Magazines

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  Cover Illustration by Phil Cornell

  CONTENTS

  Fiction: THE DEVIL'S ACRE by Steve Hockensmith

  Fiction: THE GRAY LADY by David A. Knadler

  Fiction: SKULL AND CROSS-EXAMINATIONS by Toni L. P. Kelner

  Department of First Stories: THE CORONATION COIN by C. J. Harper

  Fiction: THE CREAM TREATMENT by Jeffry Scott

  Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

  Fiction: FALSE COLOURS by Judith Cutler

  Fiction: A MATTER OF JUSTICE by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg

  Reviews: BLOG BYTES by Bill Crider

  Fiction: KILLING BY THE CLOCK by Barbara Cleverly

  Passport to Crime: THE LONG NIGHT OF A PENITENT by Yasmina Khadra

  Fiction: A SCANDAL IN MONTREAL by Edward D. Hoch

  NEXT ISSUE...

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  Fiction: THE DEVIL'S ACRE by Steve Hockensmith

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  Art by Allen Davis

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  The action in this new Big Red/Old Red story takes place between that of the author's second novel On the Wrong Track (St. Martin's, paperback, January ‘08) and the book due to be released this month, The Black Dove (St. Martin's, hardcover). The inimitable duo debuted in EQMM and rejoin us in each February issue as part of our tribute to Sherlock Holmes.

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  Urias Smythe

  Smythe & Associates Publishing, Ltd.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York

  —

  Dear Mr. Smythe:

  I trust this letter finds you and your associates well. I can only assume it finds the lot of you mighty busy, as I have yet to hear your reaction to the book I submitted to you last month: On the Wrong Track, or Lockhart's Last Stand, An Adventure of the Rails.

  Not that I am in the slightest impatient to have you get to it. Quite the contrary. Like a fine wine—or, to be more democratically minded, a jug of corn-mash moonshine—my book can but ripen with age. Though I could perhaps add that the public's interest in sampling said concoction might likely diminish as the events that precipitated its distilling recede ever further into the past. Even as dazzling an episode as the commandeering of a Southern Pacific express train fades with time, just as fine wine and moonshine alike eventually turn to vinegar.

  But why point this out to you? As a successful publisher, you are no doubt well aware of the importance of striking while the (in this case, railroad) iron is hot. So I leave it to you to proceed at what I assume is your usual measured, deliberate, dawdling pace.

  By no means rush yourselves on my account—or your own!

  No, I write to you today not to urge undue (or due) haste in your reply. Rather, it's because, while my book has lain fallow, I have not.

  As I mentioned in my last letter to you, based on sheer quantity of thrills, chills, and close scrapes, the heroes of your own Deadwood Dick Magazine and Billy Steele: Boy Detective seem like elderly shut-in spinsters compared to my brother and myself. While ol’ Dick or little Billy manage to get themselves into some kind of dustup each and every month, hardly a day passes without a new threat to life and limb for me and Gustav. Why, I'm sometimes reluctant to so much as get out of bed to make water for fear I'll be attacked by rampaging Apaches or kidnapped by pirates on my way to the privy.

  As a case in point, allow me to relate the latest near-calamity to befall us—a tale, incidentally, that I think would fit quite snugly in the pages of one of your magazines. Jesse James Library, say. Or, even better, Big Red and Old Red Library.

  To refresh your memory, Big Red and Old Red would be me and my elder brother Gustav. We picked up our nicknames on the cattle trails we once worked as cowboys, though our handles have little of the drover's usual irony about them. A fat cowhand may be “Skinny,” a thin one “Tubby,” or a dumb one “Professor,” but I am with no uncertainty about it big. Old Red's not old per se, having put in a mere twenty-seven years on this earth of ours, but he does tend to act aged, often coming across as crotchety as Methuselah suffering a flareup of lumbago. As for the “Red,” our hair accounts for that, it being ... well, as you might assume, not exactly powder blue.

  Having recently lost our jobs as Southern Pacific rail dicks (the railroad frowning upon the mislaying of company property, be it a coffee mug, a signal lantern, or—ahem—a locomotive), Old Red and I found ourselves jobless, friendless, and near-penniless in the S.P.'s hometown: San Francisco. Naturally, we wouldn't be welcome at the Palace Hotel along with the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds and whichever other visiting fat cats might be on hand. So we ended up instead in the neighborhood known as “the Barbary Coast” ... along with the sailors and the macks and the rest of the wharf rats.

  Of course, the Coast has a certain reputation, what with its dance halls, deadfalls, footpads, floozies, and all-around atmosphere of iniquity. And it lives up to said reputation—or perhaps I should say sinks down to it. But once you've seen a pack of young drovers cut their wolves loose at the end of a five-month cattle drive, there's little in the way of wildness that can shock you anymore. Take Dodge City of a Saturday night, switch all the Stetsons to sailor's caps and derbies, and multiply the noise and chaos by a factor of four, and you'll get the Barbary Coast. We figured we could handle it.

  We chose for our lodgings a rooming house on Pacific invitingly named The Cowboy's Rest. The Cockroach's Rest would have been more accurate, as we saw more cucarachas than cowpokes thereabouts. But shoddy and shantylike though the place might be, it offered several advantages as a base of operations, the foremost being (in my brother's mind) the cheapness of its rooms and (in mine) the cheapness of the drinks served in the saloon downstairs. The Rest is also a mere twenty-minute walk from the local office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and it was there we intended to go as soon as the scrapes and bruises we'd collected during our brief run as railroad detectives had healed.

  Old Red, you'll recall (assuming you've read my book by now and are merely in the process of securing the huge sums of money required to properly publicize its publication), had it in his head that he'd make a top-rail sleuth. He'd picked up this seemingly peculiar notion from the tales of the late, great Sherlock Holmes that have been appearing of late in the pages of one of your competitors. I say seemingly peculiar because, as it turns out, Gustav really does have a natural talent for detectiving ... even if his attempts to prove it tend to end in disaster.

  Come to think of it, they can begin disastrously, too—which was almost the case here.

  When not sniffing around after an actual mystery, you see, Old Red likes to practice his craft on strangers, sizing them up for clues he can use to piece together the particulars of their lives. “Just got throwed out by his wife,” he might say to me, nodding at a glum-looking gent with rouge on his cheek and a wrinkled shirttail hanging from his carpetbag. Or “Best lock up the silver when she's in to clean” as we pass a shifty-eyed woman in a maid's uniform—just before she veers off into a pawnshop, a muffled, metallic clinking coming from the bundle tucked under one arm.

  It was with this pastime in mind that Gustav and I secured for ourselves a corner table in
the barroom of the Cowboy's Rest the other day. My brother would sharpen his wits with observation and deducification, I would dull mine with steam beer, and thus we might wile away a pleasant afternoon.

  And pleasant it was, too ... right up to the moment someone got it in his head to kill us.

  The someone in question was a fellow of the type the Frisco papers have taken to calling a “hoodlum"—a young, oily-haired hooligan wearing an oversized frock coat, a red velvet vest, a rakishly tilted felt hat, and a plain old-fashioned sneer. He'd been seated with a similarly slicked-up and scowly compadre a few tables over, and their hissy whispers and low, dark laughter had about them a most definitive air of skulduggery. This, of course, attracted my brother's undivided attention ... so undivided, in fact, it eventually drew some attention itself.

  "What's your problem, m?” one of the hoodlums snarled, addressing my brother with a term your typesetters would no doubt refuse to put in print.

  "I ain't got no problem,” Gustav replied.

  "You sure as h do."

  The hood rose from his chair. He probably topped out at a mere five foot four ... but when he whipped out his six-inch knife he may as well have been Goliath.

  "Why you been staring at us, a?"

  "Look, friend,” I cut in, “I can't speak for the a here, but I'm starin’ at one heck of a big pigsticker. And frankly, I'd rather I wasn't. So why not put it away and let me buy you a beer, huh?"

  "Shut up, c. I was talking to him.” The young thug took a step toward our table, his glare locked on my brother. “Why the eyeballing? You some kind of g copper?"

  "Nope,” Old Red said ... and said no more. My brother may be a mighty slick thinker, but when it comes to talking there are times he's about as slick as flypaper. Not that it really mattered just then.

  As the hood took another step toward us, his friend stood to join him. This second fellow was bigger than his buddy, and a gold band gleamed across one of his curled fists—brass knuckles. Maybe not quite so deadly as a knife, yet still a good sight more dangerous than the bare skin-and-bone knuckles we had to defend ourselves with.

  Obviously, slick wasn't going to get us spit with these hombres. The only thing they'd understand was rough. So that's what I aimed to give them.

  "All right, you stupid q-b zs,” I growled, coming to my feet. “You asked for it."

  The hoodlums froze, looking confused. Apparently, they'd never been called q-b zs before.

  I picked up my chair.

  "Y'all might wanna clear out,” I said to the only other patrons in the place—a pair of pea-coated sailors who sat leering at our little standoff as if we were the cancan dancers at one of the melodeons up the street. “There's gonna be an awful lotta wood and brain and such flyin’ around here in a second."

  The sailors scooted their seats back a few feet.

  "Thank you.” I pivoted and swung the chair up over my head, facing the hoodlums like a baseball batter awaiting the first pitch. “I do like to have me a little extra elbow room when I'm about to serve up a whuppin'."

  "Put down the chair, Brother."

  I peeked back at Old Red. Not only was he still in his chair, he sat so motionless he could have been mistaken for a piece of furniture himself.

  "For a feller who prides himself on his powers of observation, you seem to be missin’ something a tad obvious,” I said. “Like, for instance, that those ain't fresh-picked posies them bs got in their hands."

  "Oh, I ain't worried about them two,” my brother said.

  The smaller of the two hoodlums spat out a cackle. “You oughta be, f."

  "Nope. Y'all ain't gonna lay a hand on us.” Gustav jerked his head to the left. “It's that scattergun makes me nervous."

  "Scattergun?"

  I craned my head around to get a better look over my shoulder.

  There was our landlady, one “Cowboy Mag,” standing behind the bar with a sawed-off shotgun in her hands.

  "It might be pointed at you two, but still...” Old Red went on, talking to the hoods. “Them things got quite a spray to ‘em. Never know who's gonna pick up a pellet when the buckshot flies."

  "Ma'am,” I said with a polite nod to Mag, and I set my chair gently on the floor and took a seat.

  "Ha!” the thug with the blade barked without bothering to turn for a look himself. “Like I'm gonna fall for that!"

  "Listen up, you p vs!” Mag boomed, and just in case she wasn't speaking loud enough, she let her shotgun get in a word, too—by thumbing back the hammers. “No h fs gonna l with my j-y customers in my w place. So you'd better t s your v rs outta here ... and you can go l your u gs up your d ms while you're at it!"

  Now, we drovers might not be the worldliest fellows, but when it comes to cursing we're as learned as any man jack on this earth. “Q-b zs” not something you'll pick up on any old street corner, you know.

  For sheer width and breadth of filth, though, Cowboy Mag had me beat by a country mile. To be truthful, I didn't understand half of what the woman had just said.

  Her intentions were clear enough, though: If those hoods didn't skedaddle, they'd soon find their “d ms” filled with lead.

  The hoods skedaddled—pronto.

  "G,” Mag chuckled as she put her double-barreled bouncer back beneath the bar. “That'll teach those t hs to p around in my b m."

  (As I assume you have by now fully absorbed the flavor of conversation in the Coast, I won't bother with any more s. Just insert your own d or s or some such between every other word and you'll be getting the talk pretty much as Gustav and I heard it.)

  "Thanks kindly for the help,” I said.

  Mag leaned forward onto the bar. She was an oversized woman in body as well as spirit, and for a moment there it looked like her bosom was about to spill from her low-cut dress like twin pumpkins from a cornucopia.

  "If I thought you two were coppers, it's you I would've run off,” she said. “Cowboys, ain't you?"

  "Ma'am,” I said, “you are a regular Sherlock Holmes."

  Old Red rolled his eyes ... beneath his big white Boss of the Plains. We may have been spitting distance from the Pacific, yet he still insisted on dressing like we were moving cattle up the Chisholm Trail. And while I'd tried to citify myself with a cheap suit and a new bowler, I knew I couldn't pass for a slicker just yet—not with my Plains drawl and sun-darkened skin.

  "Got a soft spot for punchers, do you?” I said to Mag.

  "Ol’ Mag's nothing but soft spots!” she roared back, giving her shoulders a shake that set her bosom to quivering like we were in the midst of a California earthquake. “But yeah ... they don't call me ‘Cowboy Mag’ cuz I'm crazy about tailors. Used to have hands coming through the Coast all the time, bringing cattle in from Monterey and Sonoma. Not so much anymore. Which is why I'm so pleased to have a couple real buckaroos like yourselves around for a while. So ... what brings you thisaway, anyhow?"

  "Bad luck, mostly,” I said, and I offered up a heavily expurgated version of our woes (the full tale being offered exclusively to Smythe & Associates ... for the moment).

  "So now you're broke, huh?” Mag said when I was done.

  As “Would we be stayin’ in this dump if we weren't?” struck me as more than a trifle rude, I offered up a simple “Yup” instead.

  "Well, I can help you with that. Cowboys can always get work on the docks, you know. You're handy with knots and ain't afraid to work up a little sweat. Tell you what—"

  Mag produced a stubby pencil from somewhere in her voluminous gray-black hair and began scribbling across the front page of that day's MorningCall.

  "Just say Cowboy Mag sent you."

  She ripped off a strip of paper and held it out to me. On it, I saw once I'd walked up to take it, were scrawled these words:

  NO. 35 PACIFIC STREET—ASK FOR JOHNNY

  "Feel like tryin’ your luck as a dockhand?” I said to Old Red.

  My brother shrugged. “I reckon I don't feel like starvin'.” I finished my beer w
ith a gulp, Gustav took two to polish off his, and off we went.

  Outside, the sky above was clear and blue ... and the street below it crowded and befouled. Our little corner of the Coast was so jam-packed with dens of sin, folks had dubbed it the “Devil's Acre,” and certainly this day it had every appearance of being one of Hell's more swarming quarters. Great herds of drunken men staggered from saloon to dance hall, dance hall to brothel, and then brothel back to saloon to begin the cycle anew. They paused only to piss, puke, or pass out, and no matter which it was they were likely relieved of their wallets in the process. For once, it was almost an advantage being flat busted, as the pickpockets had little to pick from ours but lint.

  It took us nearly a quarter-hour to slog through this quagmire of corruption to No. 35 Pacific Street, and in that time we laid eyes on more decadence and depravity than most Christians see in a lifetime. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect at journey's end—a union hall or shipping office, maybe. So when it turned out to be yet another dive drinkery, I was surprised less by this discovery than by my own naiveté. The natives wouldn't have stood for an actual place of work in the Barbary Coast. Why, it would be an affront to community standards.

  "After you,” I said to Old Red ... which meant I was kept waiting on the sidewalk a spell, for my brother made no move to go inside. He just stood there staring at the entrance to that watering hole.

  "It's called a ‘door,'” I explained helpfully. “Folks put ‘em in the sides of buildings so you don't have to climb down the chimney to get inside. Wanna give it a try?"

  Gustav nodded at the saloon. It was a deadfall—an unlicensed groggery of the sort that so skimps on pretense it doesn't even bother having a name. You know it's a place for drinking simply because a steady stream of men stumble in drunk and stumble out drunker.

  "Kinda seedy, ain't it?” Old Red said.

  "As a watermelon. But that'd be about right for fellers workin’ the piers, wouldn't it?"

  "Them and certain others."